Research Seminars

Research seminars

"Happy shopping, me ducks!": The Dukki Facebook Corpus

Luke Collins (Lancaster University)

Wednesday 27th February 2019

Businesses engaging with social media face the challenge of distinguishing themselves through a clear and coherent brand identity. I present a case study of how the Nottingham-based independent business ‘Dukki’ uses Facebook to establish a brand identity that is firmly rooted in the local community and manifest in the appropriation of the Nottinghamshire dialect. This case study demonstrates how researchers can use corpus approaches to investigate highly stylised forms of online communication as well as how businesses construct their own identity and that of their customer base.

In addition to representing the local dialect as a feature of the products that they sell, Dukki also constructs the business’s Facebook posts through an approximation of the dialect. This study examines a corpus of 862 posts collected throughout 2017 and considers the following questions:

How does Dukki represent itself as a business in its Facebook posts?

How does Dukki characterise its customer base in its Facebook posts?

How does Dukki contribute to the enregisterment (Agha, 2003) of the Nottinghamshire dialect through its Facebook posts?

Keyword analysis identified the labels through which Dukki refers to itself and to its customers and by analysing the collocates of those terms, we can see what types of qualities and processes Dukki projects onto itself and presupposes of its customers.

References

Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23, 231–273.